I'm a programmer not a designer but here's my $.02. As a user I like the flat UI concept not because of the flatness, but because of the colours. I'm tired of looking at grey all day and these provide a welcome change.
"As a user I like the flat UI concept not because of the flatness, but because of the colours"
I did an unsolicited redesign of a wikipedia article page a few months ago (mostly a tweak to the current layout). Although Wikipedia is a website rather than an app, the site's pages are are quite stark and many pages feel bereft of colour. In my (unsolicited) redesign I added colour to soften the appearance of the page and to highlight elements. Are the colours superfluous? Or do they make the page or site more pleasant to read? Opinions very welcome :-)
I like that design a great deal, and at a glance I find it subjectively more readable. I'd have to A/B test it with real wiki content for a while to be sure.
When I look at code in a text editor I prefer it to be colored. All white text on black puts me to sleep. It's also easier to see that this is not the same kind of thing as that.
Design isn't about us liking those tastes or not. One part is about ergonomy of course, and the other is about looking up-to-date. Just watching the colors of a website/app, you could tell which year it was made and whether it's well maintained or not.
One could ask "Why do we define a fashion, given this fashion costs heaps to everyone in the industry and isn't necessarily nice or ergonomic". Remind that for every free land, humans will populate it, define rules and laws and regulations and fashions and richness, and whether it is good or not it can only go forward, with more laws, regulations, fashions and richness.
And taste only tells how close you are with society and how distinct you are from uniformity. http://xkcd.com/915/ So you must both stick to the trend and stay peculiar. The trend is defined by very few "haute couture" designers in the industry and we're only adapting it to our clients.
That's kind of my point. Do you like the colours (specifically these ones, or colours like them) because they're an alternative to grey or do you actually like them in and of themselves?
